By prior art teachings, silicon is deposited upon the surfaces of U-shaped carrier members made to silicon. Such a carrier member is mounted upright in the interior of a reaction vessel which can consist of a base plate fitted with a gas-tight bell thereover. An electrode is connected to each free end of the carrier member and such is heated by way of an electric current supplied via the electrodes. A reaction gas flows through the reaction container. Silicon separates from this atmosphere and deposits upon surfaces of the carrier member.
The carrier member may consist of one piece, since it is known in the art that silicon may be plastically deformed as soon as it is sufficiently hot, but the danger exists that a one piece carrier member at its bent locations will heat up during the deposition operation to an essentially different temperature than at its straight locations, so that an uneven growth of deposited silicon on surfaces thereof will result. For this reason, the U-shaped carrier member has been commonly made, in the past, of two equally sized parallel rods having a connection bridge across the upper ends of such two rods, such bridge consisting of a further silicon rod. While it is true, that this arrangement will provide centrifications will respect to reproduction of the desired carrier members, this arrangement can result in the presence of additional impurities which are undesirable when a good conductive connection is desired to start with between individual elements of such an arrangement. Furthermore, if one does not want to weld together the individual components of such a multi-element U-shaped carrier, mechanical oscillations of the bridge, and even a possible loss of the bridge, must be anticipated under subsequent use conditions since ponderomotive forces may occur due to the alternating currents applied as heating means.